Mapping the brain is wave of the future

President Barack Obama leaves the stage in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 2, 2013, after he spoke about the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative.
AP Photo/Charles Dharapak

President Barack Obama leaves the stage in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 2, 2013, after he spoke about the BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative.

President Barack Obama on Tuesday launched an unprecedented effort to map the inner workings of the brain with the help of dozens of scientists and engineers from San Diego, a world leader in the study of how people think, learn and behave.

The BRAIN initiative will cost upwards of $1 billion over a decade, much of which will be spent on inventing sensors and imagers that will give scientists their first look at how huge numbers of neurons communicate and collaborate. The technological leap is needed to understand how the brain functions when it is healthy and what goes wrong when things like autism, epilesy and Alzheimer’s disease arise.

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At least $28 million in private money will come from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, which will tackle the challenge with its long-time partner, the University of California San Diego.

The project will require new ways to process and distribute extraordinary amounts of data, an advance that will be made possible by innovations likely to come from such places as Qualcomm, the San Diego telecommunications giant that specializes in chips and high-speed wireless computing. The goal: Enable scientists to simultaneously record the activity of about 1 million neurons. Today, they can only "see" about 200.

Terry Sejnowski, head of the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute of Biological Studies

Experts say the initiative -- formally known as the Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies, or BRAIN, --will likely send tens of millions of dollars in grants to “the Mesa,” the collection of research centers along North Torrey Pines Road in La Jolla. The Mesa is home to the University of California San Diego, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and other centers that support one of the largest groups of neuroscientists and nanoengineers in the country.

“The new mapping tools will transform our understanding of the brain in the way that the Human Genome Project revealed the nature of DNA,” said Terry Sejnowski, a Salk neuroscientist who helped shape the initiative, and who will serve on a federal committee to outline the plan's future. He attended the White House announcement on BRAIN, appearing with UC San Diego's Ralph Greenspan, one of the project's original six architects.

The BRAIN project represents an unusual partnership between government and the private sector. It will begin in 2014 with $110 million in seed money from the federal government. Additional funding is expecting in the following years. The Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle says it will spend more than $60 million a year, for an undetermined period, to support the initative. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute will spend $30 million a year, also for for an undetermined period, on Brain projects.

The California-based Kavli Foundation will increase the endowment of its joint brain institute at the Salk and UCSD by $4 million, provided that the two science centers raise $8 million in matching funds.

UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, who attended Tuesday's White House announcement, said, "Raising money is always difficult. But this has been a long time in coming and it is absolutely will chart the next frontier in science."